


Skaianet Laboratories: A Primer

by Bobsled_Hostage



Series: Nobilis Patch Notes AU AU [1]
Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures, Nobilis - R. Sean Borgstrom
Genre: Alternate Universe, ConSentiency Universe if you squint, Gen, Replay Value AU, Technobabble, sburb patch notes universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 03:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5441927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobsled_Hostage/pseuds/Bobsled_Hostage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Predominantly worldbuilding with a small amount of editorializing.  Works best with "View Entire Work" on</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Organization

**Author's Note:**

> Predominantly worldbuilding with a small amount of editorializing. Works best with "View Entire Work" on

Skaianet Laboratories’ Headquarters is an ever expanding cluster habitat located in a pocket dimension, transit in and out of which is accomplished via transportalizer (control of transportalizer access/construction of new junctions being a key lever of power) or via the user’s own abilities.  Part space station, part cube farm, part nightmare made material, this ever-expanding warren of offices, labs, apartments, storage and support facilities was nicknamed  _ Dosadi  _ in ages long past by some bright young programmer whose bones are now dust.  A jagged, irregular ball of glass, plastic, metal and other more exotic materials, Dosadi is subdivided into various fiefdoms, several of which extend into their own smaller pocket universes, each one more or less belonging to a division of the company.

Nominally, each division is assigned a role based on a certain function within the company.  In practice, a division or department (the two are interchangeable) is organized around a single powerful player, equipped with an alchemiter, and between fifty and two hundred players, as well as a variable number of nonplayers, non sentient creatures, thinking machines, etc.  The alchemiter is the primary source of power at Skaianet, outside a player’s own personal skills and (usually aspect related) abilities.  The power to fabricate anything, along with blueprints from centuries of plundered worlds at every technological level, means the power to create and destroy at will.  Anyone with an alchemiter has the capacity to build anything, from a swarm of carpenter drones to construct a new addition to their wing of Dosadi, to a telepathic virus that converts the victim’s body into microsingularities.  Once someone is in possession of an alchemiter, attempting to take it away is thus typically an exercise in mutually assured destruction.  Given this it is certainly fair to expect that no new alchemiters would ever be created or distributed, but every so often some fool believes it will serve their interest to issue one to some exceptionally loyal servant, and thus a new division is spun off.

Department heads have immense, though in practice not absolute, authority over their employees.  Notably, since department heads control both transportalizers and alchemiters, their subjects must depend on them even for basic physical needs, and most will severely punish any attempts to secure nourishment from other sources.  Depending on their disposition, they may hold communal meals where subjects demonstrate their servility to receive nourishment, pay their employees in scrip and operate a sort of “company store,” or force workers to compete with one another for sustenance.  Generally employees’ quality of life varies greatly, depending both on who employs them and on their talents and skills, with the vast majority of employers giving precedence to their more able subordinates.  This is not only a meritocratic system, it also reflects the diminishing wisdom in making enemies of successively more powerful players, even if they are nominally under the department head’s dictatorial control.  Thus, a division lead’s workforce gaining experience is a double edged sword: the more powerful their underlings are, the more their capabilities expand, but the more reason they have to fear a coup.

Every department has a section of Dosadi to call its own, which comprises the living and working space of its members.  Employees spend most of their time within their own department, sometimes visiting public or neutral ground and more rarely venturing into the fiefdoms of other divisions.  Thanks to the millennia of plundered technology at their fingertips, the shape, size and contents of a fiefdom are limited only by the division leader’s twisted imagination, as well as their stocks of grist (which can always be recovered from dying sessions or widgeted from existing objects).  Employees may be crowded together into squalid communal dormitories or housed in pleasant apartments.  Meals might be taken in a sterile, tiled cafeteria, or a mead hall warmed by a roaring fire.  The architecture could be tightly packed with an economy of space, or spiral outward in indefinite fractal branches.  Every fiefdom is hardened against both game related and technological threats, from scrying to nuclear weapons to nanotechnology.  Many extend into their own smaller pocket universes, maintained either by technological means or by the aspect powers of their rulers.  Division leaders engage in limited trade with one another, usually swapping items that for whatever reason cannot be fabricated (such as objects with strong aspect charges), novel alchemiter blueprints, souvenirs from interesting variant earths, or most commonly their employees.

Skaianet is led by two CEOs, founders of the organization made all-powerful and virtually immortal by centuries of experience and world after world of stolen posthuman technology, and made insane by millennia after millennia of mind numbing horror.  Directives come down from corporate to various departments, who carry them out under threat of annihilation.  The entirety of Skaianet might be a match for the CEOs, but individual departments cannot hope to challenge them, even with the resources at their disposal.  It is for this reason that corporate tolerates a certain amount of factional conflict and works to prevent dangerous accumulations of power outside their own office.  Rumors continually circulate regarding the founders having established some manner of “backup” or “reset button” in case some monstrous catastrophe should befall Skaianet Labs.


	2. The Task At Hand

Skaianet Laboratories’ mission is to produce as many universes as possible, at a greater rate than they are destroyed. This means ensuring that as many Sburb sessions are completed as possible, and that the game’s code is kept up to date such that the new universes which are created are able to produce Sburb sessions, which are able to produce Genesis Frogs, which are able to produce new universes, etc and so on.

Coders develop patches to ensure that new universes are created and that the game functions smoothly. Nominally, the process is automatic, with every session generating a universe, which generates a session of its own. In practice this is seldom the case. The software stretches back to the earliest days of Skaianet, was barely understood and only somewhat functional in its first iteration, and has only grown more byzantine down the centuries, strung together from miles and miles of undocumented spaghetti logic. Programmer-archaeologists sift through the codebase with the aid of state of the art data mining software and even the occasional AI assistant (though this typically ends in tragedy), attempting to discern which functions are tied to what. A full audit of the software would take unacceptably long, with too many universes faltering or dying in the meantime, and thus Skaianet Labs must run to stay in place, piling on layer after layer of complexity and madness.

Interventions in Sburb sessions to create universes are handled by troubleshooters. Troubleshooters are able to infiltrate sessions using transportalizers, which can be attuned to the transportalizers present in veil labs within the targeted session bubble. This sort of intervention can be anything from the inserting a few missing game objects, to liquidating the current crop of players and brute forcing the game to completion. The resources available to the average troubleshooter are several orders of magnitude greater than the average player, in terms of both game abilities and hardware, but often troubleshooters are forced to make do with limited resources (the higher ups may not trust them with some of the more advanced kit) or to tackle challenges that far outstrip their abilities (turnover is high and the more experienced agents are always busy).

A division will have a director, usually one or more trusted advisor, a layer of specialists and middle managers, and a body of drones who perform the lion’s share of the department’s tasks. In times long past each division had a clearly defined role, with most either updating game code or troubleshooting problem sessions and universes. While the current state of affairs still sees this sort of specialization among departments, it is not uncommon for them to infringe on one another’s functions, with a cadre of troubleshooters maintaining a few talented hackers on staff, or a cabal of programmers operating a transportalizer for illicit excursions outside the session bubble. As a rule, coders resent the autonomy granted to the troubleshooters, while troubleshooters resent the safety enjoyed by the coders.

Ancillary to the sharp end of operations are the support staff who perform the logistical and administrative tasks necessary for the smooth, or at least passable functioning of the organization. This includes missions to gather grist from dead or dying sessions, recruit important nonplayers from presession worlds, generic middle management tasks, the list goes on. Aspect powers, nonplayers, carapaces and universe after universe of robotics expertise have more or less obviated manual labor, except perhaps as exercise or a form of hazing.


	3. The Funhouse Never Shuts Down

Employees are recruited from players who manage to find their way into the Skaianet pocket dimension.  This can be anyone from ring travellers fleeing dead sessions to curious players who follow inept (or devious) troubleshooters back through a transportalizer before the connection is severed.  These interlopers are given a choice between employment or death, and Skaianet Laboratories is more than capable of making good on this threat.  New employees tend to be inducted into whatever department gets its hands on them first, though not everyone wants every new hire.

As mentioned before, the nature and quality of employees’ lives varies massively depending on who employs them.  A department can feel like anything from a corporation, military unit, extended family, nation state, or most commonly a combination of the above.  Most departments subject new hires to some form of hazing or initiation, serving to develop bonds and functioning as a brutal introduction to Skaianet life.  Employees are rarely allowed to leave their division for another at their own volition, although every department employs headhunters to try their hand at swiping promising workers from the competition.  Regardless of their employer, life for most drones at Skaianet is anxious and terrifying at least some of the time, even for the most mundane bureaucratic functionaries.  The extremely deadly powers wielded especially by veteran staff, combined with their sociopathic demeanor as a result of repeated behavior modifications, trauma and socially mandated inability to feel affection, mean office politics often take a turn for the violent.  It is not unusual in many circles for employees to advance by killing their seniors.

Transportalizer use is ruthlessly monitored to prevent escapes, as are the session bubbles and presession worlds to which troubleshooters are dispatched.  Most pre-session worlds only have transportalizers installed in their equivalent of Skaianet Laboratories in the years, months or even weeks leading up to the meteors, meaning the game usually cleans up anyone unwilling to return home for debriefing.  Rumor has it that once the portals could take you back centuries before the reckoning, and that the suits curtailed this after too many runners got the bright idea to live out the rest of their natural lifespan among the normals.  Similarly, session decay prevents anyone from hanging around in Sburb sessions too long after their completion.


	4. Don't Forget: You're Here Forever

The Human Resources Department, variously referred to as the _Inhuman Resources Department_ , _DemoPol_ , or _The Thoughtcrime Boys_ , acts to enforce company policy across departments.  HR’s concern is to see that departments and their employees are not acting counter to the interests of the organization at large, and to see that they obey what little legislation exists outside individual divisions.  In this way HR functions as a sort of Internal Affairs division, to the best of their abilities.  While on paper its most important function is to enforce proscriptions on technologies deemed to be hazardous to the organization at large, the most common intervention the department carries out is enforcement of company policy regarding relationships and various other interpersonal activity.  Love is forbidden because, entirely aside from the problems it poses for being precise, decisive, and ruthless, it interferes with certain types of omniscience that Skaianet uses for contingency planning. The Seers correct for a certain amount of “extracurricular activity” in nonplayers and players, and a low level of illicit activity is unofficially also assumed and corrected for, but anyone actually caught in a relationship of love with a specific entity is getting sent to Psychiatry to be reprogrammed.  HR insists on not wasting resources, and they maintain some of the company’s most promising psychiatrists and psychosurgeons, as well as Mind and Heart experts, to brainhack rule violators into compliance.  It is for this reason that the division’s employees are subject to mandatory behavior modification and regular checkups, to ensure that they are not exceeding their prescribed duties in modifying their patients’ psyches.  One other function is the pursuit of escapees which other divisions have neglected to track down, for which HR employs a party of ruthlessly edited manhunters, drawn from troubleshooters who have fallen into their hands.

The degree to which HR can infringe upon other divisions’ autonomy is never one hundred percent clear.  They officially have the CEOs’ backing to enforce company directives regarding personnel, but the extent that corporate will actually back them up is rarely certain.  If their goons show up at a division lead’s office, it’s most likely to haul off one of their peons for a mindscrub following some imagined offence.  Most departments are willing to turn over a cube jockey or two for reprogramming, but if HR targets more valued employees they are likely to encounter considerable pushback, or even outright refusal to comply.  HR may be among the best staffed and equipped subunits in the organization, but this does not make it a wise decision for them to engage in internecine warfare with other departments, especially when it is an open question as to whether they would receive assistance from corporate, or from any other divisions.


	5. Example Staff

Makhleb “pineappleMinefields” von Manstein

Native Page of Might

Manstein is a division head, notable for the extreme aggression that he displayed in his rise to power, showing little regard for common sense, dignity or his own safety.  His total disregard for bodily and psychological harm before and since his ascension have left him scarred both physically and mentally, beyond the considerable damage most veteran employees bear.  As a result his body and brain are technologically augmented to an almost excessive degree.  Vicious as he is, his native aspect imparts on him a strong sense of justice, which he cannot betray without losing the Wave’s blessing.  Thus, the loyalty he demonstrates for his employees as a result has gotten him into a number of fixes, colliding with both other divisions and HR.

His fiefdom is a facsimile of the Aegean coastline, complete with island chains, coral reefs and scenic ruins of toppled marble.

 

Roger “skinnerBox” Burris 

Native Seer of Mind

Burris is a middle manager, plagued by disfiguring facial scars and an injury to his left leg that leaves him hobbled and in almost constant pain.  He suffered these injuries in the field as a troubleshooter, and it would be trivial, given the department’s resources, to cure his ailments completely.  The division head prefers to keep the possibility of making him whole in her back pocket, the better to dangle it over him as motivation.  His mind functions perfectly well with the rest of his body maimed, he consistently impresses with his mentat-like computational and predictive abilities, along with his considerable mastery over his native aspect.

He keeps a “pickled guild navigator” in a jar in his study, which he claims shields his apartment from prescient vision.

 

Rita “trampledRose” Nuwen 

Native Maid of Heart

Nuwen is a psychosurgeon in the Human Resources department.  Once a programmer, she was scooped up by HR and mindscrubbed after being caught in an illicit relationship with a coworker.  Rather than return her to an unremarkable existence tweaking basilisk spawn rates and painting over dev textures, the tech responsible for rewriting her decided she was a promising candidate for work in Psychiatry.  Nuwen took to work as a head louse quickly, gaining a reputation as a Heart Surgeon for whom no case was too difficult, no intervention too extreme.  She honestly believes she is helping her patients become healthier, better, even happier people.

Her favorite song is _Union Square_

**Author's Note:**

> AU of OJ's [Nobilis Patch Notes](http://eternity-braid.tumblr.com/search/nobilis+patch+notes), which is an AU of Sburb Patch Notes, which is an RP setting based on Homestuck, which is an inferior followup to Problem Sleuth


End file.
